


Thy Memory as a Dwelling-Place

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Promptfic, The Doctor wallows in the past, The Vault (Doctor Who), also he gets wet, and Missy doesn't exactly get her way, before he can plan for the future, but she sure tries, flashfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 10:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15435045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: In their first moments in the vault, the Doctor and Missy set the tone for the years to come, even while grappling with memory and vulnerability.(One sort of an answer to the questions, "Who holds the other just above the ground and kisses them? And who is louder in bed? Who is more seductive when they are drunk? Who is always horny and will have sex at any time, at any place and at any time? Who starts random slow dancing with the other in the kitchen?")





	Thy Memory as a Dwelling-Place

He asks Nardole for help in moving Missy to the vault, but when the time comes to pick her up he can’t bring himself to let him touch her--she’s dangerous, that’s his excuse--so he slips his arms around her knees and shoulders and carries her himself, gathering her body close to his chest as he shifts her weight in his arms, standing. Why is the Master almost always so small? How does this ruthless creature come to seem so vulnerable so often? Up close, her skin is too hot, almost electric, as though she’s had a fever.

Fear, that’s the fever.

The Doctor wades into the shallows. The current pushes against his thighs, cold water sprung from rocky depths. Missy’s skirts surge against his legs. He’s careful to hold her out of the flow as he steps across the opaque loch. When Nardole opens the doors, the water rushes in, driving them over the threshold before draining away invisibly, as though the vault knows it was made to receive her. But a tomb befitting the Master would be lavish, plush, dark. The inside of the vault is merely dim and empty.

The Doctor sinks to his knees against the bare concrete. Missy is so still he begins to wonder if he’s miscalibrated that appalling device, if he’s damaged her in spite of her waking long enough to laugh at her executioners.

 

The last time he’d refused to let the Master go, he’d held the still form until he’d had to admit it was time to swaddle him in undyed cloths, to bind with ropes and fell the trees and build the pyre. It doesn’t take much to remember with a sick vividness the slick floors of the Valiant, the bitter whir of its recycled air, the raw rubbing of woollen suiting against his palms, not so different from the stuff Missy wears now. His throat raw, too, with frustration, pain rocking him, insensate to the world beyond his loss.

 

“Doctor?” Nardole asks, and with a wince the Doctor realises he’s been doubled up in his damp clothes too long, muscles stiffening.

“To think they thought I’d kill her.” He kisses her brow, a quick, furtive half-gesture, not sure he’d want to if she were awake. Then he unfolds himself gingerly, cushioning the back of Missy’s head with his hand as he lowers her to the floor.

She moans.

“Oh!” Nardole exclaims, jumping. Is he alarmed? Titillated?

Echoes bounce around the vault, which nonetheless is stifling. Muffling. Compressing. The Doctor peers at all that flat surface rising around them. “This place is awful. We’re going to have to bring in some chairs or furniture to absorb some of that.”

“To absorb some of the awfulness, sir?”

He opens his mouth to correct Nardole, but shuts it again. He rubs his hand over it. “Maybe a bed, too. We should probably put her on a bed. To, ah, recover.”

To his relief, Nardole busies himself with list-making and planning, pottering about muttering to himself things the Doctor doesn't try to hear. He has work to do too. To remove the vault from Extremis, he's going to have to materialise the TARDIS around it, and the one person he could consult on the calculations for the tricky maneuver doesn't seem to be in a hurry to regain consciousness.

The Doctor isn't surprised that the TARDIS complains like an outraged bull, bucking to dislodge the offending object. Maybe she senses his intentions. He has it in mind to leave a little piece of the dimensional matrix in the vault when they install it somewhere, just enough to make the interior a bit roomier, a bit more habitable. Maybe she knows what the vault was made to do, to hold a Time Lord, suspended, stopped. Maybe she just doesn't like the taste of the quantum fold locks. He doesn't like them either.

But still, he manages, and still, Missy slumbers on, snoring sometimes, and the bed might as well be a bier, but, no, he’s not going to kiss her again; she’ll wake up in her own good time, probably. Once he’s made the vault secure, he stays behind, watching her, longer than he means to. He tries chair after chair, a goldilocks restless in every one. It’s only when he finally makes up his mind to leave, planning out the security measures he’s going to have to put in, that Missy opens her eyes.

The panic’s only there for a second, but he doesn’t miss it. He pretends to.

“You were out so long, I thought you were going to regenerate,” he says, trying to sound like he’s making a joke.

“Can’t regenerate,” she reminds him, “not in here.”

She sits up, and then she swallows, her hand going to her chest.

“What is it?”

“Both hearts and all three brain stems,” she quotes. The whites of her eyes are too prominent, her pupils pinpricks. “One of my hearts isn’t-- Doctor, give me your hand.”

The Doctor hesitates. But she gets to her feet and tries to grab him, and when she does she stumbles, unsteady, startling him with her sudden lapse in grace. She catches herself before she trips outright; still, alarm floods him, and it must show.

She turns sly, coy. “So, come on...give me your hand!”

 

She places it over her hearts, just as she did that day, not so long ago, when she'd stepped out from behind a hologram and reminded him of what it was like to feel a double pulse below his fingertips. In a reverie, he'd refused to understand. It was as though she'd struck him with a bolt of pure light, so saturated he'd been blinking away the aftershocks all the way out of the dim hush into the bright revelation of a London day.

Master, Master, Master, flirting up at him through coquettish lashes since the beginning, a cat licking his fingers for cream, expecting him to weaken at the knees. Her breast curves under his palm--his own pulse is loud in his ears--he feels what she felt: only one heart beating in its cage.

 

“And you've singed my second-best blouse, too.”

“I had to make it look convincing.”

“Well, you certainly convinced me.”

“Yes…” the Doctor ducks his head. “That was the crucial part. They would never have given me custody if they'd had any hint that I was going to let you live. And your sincerity was so compelling, it made mine easy.”

“You let me beg.” Missy still hasn't let go of his hand, is still holding it against her chest.

He smiles tightly. “You're so very good at it.”

“I remember when you watched me burn,” she says, far too lightly.

“ _I remember when you made me watch you bleed_ ,” he snaps, pulling away, impatient with the way she's pushing him. He'd been the one to beg, then. They've been at this game forever. Neither ever wins.

But Missy doesn't blink. “Mm, yes, that _was_ good.”

She sits, though, gripping the bedpost, carefully casual. She's abruptly pallid. Even seated, she sways.

The Doctor’s by her side before he knows it, his arm around her shoulders.

“Geroff!” she mumbles, drunken with low blood pressure, but she releases her weight into him, allowing him to support her.

 

When he'd pointed her own weapon at her, had he believed then, that she'd had a trick up her perfectly crisp sleeve? Or had he half believed it was for real, for good, again? He'd been hollow, after, the mass of her deducted from him, casting him into the red. His debt had been a void, a door opened onto a space with nothing in it, and he’d paid it in anger, all alone, until the usual distractions had allowed him to forget the floating doubt, the afterimage of molecules scattering like motes of material aflame, afloat.

Dark binary dancing barycentrically, circling one another, one hand held behind the back, the other upraised, palm to palm...of _course_ she had been alive; as long as he was, and is, so his very first friend will be too. Eccentric orbits send them entire lifetimes away, but the fragments of their lives coalesce around each other eventually.

The Doctor is so very tired, though, of almost executing the Master, of believing he's executed the Master, of cradling the Master’s breaking body, helpless to stop the hurt.

 

Her fingers brush his thigh, and he puts his palm over them. She’s cold through her gloves, and he eases them off so that he can rub her wrists and her knuckles and the backs of her hands, trying to warm them; she’s damp, clammy, but he holds on anyway.

Missy’s jacket seems uncomfortably tight, and the Doctor thinks he should help her out of it. He could check it for that damage. He reaches for her buttons. (It’s terribly worrying when she doesn’t admonish him for tossing her jacket with such cavalier disrespect over the bedstead.) He loosens the ribbon at her collar, and the collar too, and admits that if anything is restricting her breathing, it’s the corset that he can just see peeking through her loosened shirt.

Her fingers brush the inside of his thigh; he rests his thumb along the line of her placket. He thinks he’d like to kiss her, his arm up under all that skirt, her petticoat a lace frill for his cuff. What would it be like, with a single working heart, pumping all the blood it can to a recreational cul-de-sac? She might pass out. She might make him pass out, the effect cascading from one brain to the other...it might be...fun.

The Doctor frowns. He lifts his hand from her skin. A sort of static lifts from his thoughts.

“Missy,” he admonishes, stern.

Her lips curve, her expression arch. “Aren't you a little bit curious?”

“It's too dangerous. You said you wanted to live.”

“Of course I do!” _However_ hangs in the air unspoken, and it's Missy’s turn to gaze with trepidation at the glowering box around them. She disentangles herself from him.

“Are you really going to keep me here?”

He tries not to care about how still her voice has gone, how reasonable. He tries to make his the same. “This is the price.”

“Don't leave me.” She lifts her chin and glares at him, defiant, through the indignity of her need.

“I won't. I swore an oath as a Prydonian.”

Missy snorts. Her derision is like a tonic. Soon she's hooting hysterically, pounding her chest in her hilarity. Her eyes fly open. “ _There’s_ the other heart! Finally! I was beginning to worry you'd stopped it permanently.”

 _So was I_. But he’s very carefully peeled their thoughts apart, and she doesn’t hear him. It’s for the best: if he’s to contain her for a thousand years, he’ll have to cultivate her cooperation. He’ll have to keep the upper hand. Maybe a thousand years will soften the image in his head of Missy on her knees on the little square podium, her fear a wound an animal conceals.

She promised to change. She promised to be good. He wants to see her tears again, and to believe in them, a reassuring insurance against his own.

Missy walks over to one of the walls, steady now, but subdued. She touches the impassive surface. “You’ve made my prison bigger on the inside,” she remarks.

The Doctor shrugs. “It was the least I could do.”

“Well, I’ll say.”

He should be furious. He should remind her that it’s her own fault the universe put a hit out on her, not his. In fact, it’s _her_ fault they’re trapped like this at all!

“We’ll redecorate,” he says, because decorating together is better than remembering alone. And contemplation of the absolute is completely out of the question.

“Hrm.” Missy’s tone slides into the teasing before she pivots to face him. “It’s ever so dark in here. How about some windows?”

“We’ll see.”


End file.
